🔥 FIRE Cycle: Your Roadmap to Creating and Building Fire🔥

Hey, Firestarters,

Donna and I have been back and forth on whether we should share our full FIRES cycle with you or release it to you Mr. Myaggi style. After an exciting duel, we’ve decided to share the cycle with you today and hopefully dive in more over time.

We’ve been using this cycle for about 2 years now; tweaking and perfecting it as we go. We’ve been trying it on a monthly schedule, but you are open to explore getting through all 5 steps weekly or even daily if you are a hard core pyro. The important thing is to figure out what works best for you and your style. At least to start, we recommend giving our 4 week cycle a go; especially if you are currently working 40+ hours a week.

What's the FIRE Cycle?

It's a cyclical approach to setting and achieving goals. You may already know a bit about FLOW, but let's start there; because it should always start there.

Week 1: Flow of Oxygen 🌬️

This is where we map out our next four weeks. In some respects it is like Agile/Sprint planning. We use a variation of it in our insurance job (you know, the place you work approximately 9 to 5 that pays your insurance) where we allocate points, but we tend leave those out when it comes to our “home fires”. The very first question to answer is something we hope you figured out from our Fire Finder:

What is that “Big Thing” you need to accomplish?

• Is it a new side hustle?

• Are you on a job hunt?

• Are you working to spend more time with family or friends?

• Are you competing in a marathon?

You name the goal - and it’s huge. It may be something that takes you months to accomplish. We call this our S’MORE; what is that big thing that keeps you coming back for “some more”???

Once you know what your S’MORE is, you will answer these questions:

• What will you do to start a new fire or fuel one that’s already going?

• What do you need to learn or set up?

• Why are you doing it? (Go deep – five whys deep!)

• Who do you need in your corner?

• When will it happen?

• What actions will you take in Ignite, Roar, Evolve, and S'more?

• Where are the distractions you can minimize?

Flow is about taking a breath and shifting from a place of "I Can't Even"...which we like to call ICE...to "I can do anything...in time."

The thing about ICE is that we tend to forget it is only temporary; that the ICE 🧊 of today will always melt.

FLOW is what melts that ICE. It's that oxygen to breathe and it's that time to stop thinking about all the things you can do some time and instead focus on some of the things you can do now. As you are getting started, you might take the entire week and that's okay. Remember - you weren't doing anything to get to your S’MORE last week. It's ok to take a minute and contemplate.

The most important part is to write it down! You can also type, but we are usually better about doing it when we keep a notebook far away from the depths of our computers and the internet. We are also working on a planner that we will share and hopefully ask you to try out for us.

And remember - this is only what you want to do over the next 4 weeks. Anything that takes longer you can jot down and table, but please try not to think beyond 4 weeks if you can. Once you have a solid plan, it's time to ignite!

Week 2: Ignite 🔥

This is where the action starts. It's all about building the infrastructure for your goals. Think of it as putting the pedal to the metal on a secret racetrack – no one may see it yet, but you're making moves that will win the race! 🏁 We use Asana* to track our progress (free option available so we aren't trying to sell you anything by mentioning it). In a future post we can spell out exactly how we use it, but for today just know we recommend that you have a system for what you will do and when.

The biggest difference between IGNITE and ROAR is that you are going to agree to start small and end BIG. Often Ignite is where we are doing things like learning a piece of software or working on a tool we aren’t quite ready to share with the world yet. In fact, we have one tool we are working on right now that we hope you are going to like when we are ready. ;)

Week 3/4: Roar 🦁

This is where we really crank up the intensity! If we devote 10 hours in IGNITE, ROAR is 20. The important thing is that this is when we work on something that we are ok with others knowing and witnessing. Watch us burn!!! Some may contemplate “how do they work that hard?” Well, just as ICE is temporary - ROAR is as well. We might push it into week 4, but we do that knowing we need at least 2 days for Evolve and S’more.

Week 4: Evolve and (Come Back for) S’more 🔥

We end Week 4 by taking at least 2 days to reflect on what worked and what didn't in EVOLVE and S’MORE. Did we hit our goals? Did we need more resources than we planned for? Is this still the right fire and we just need to grab some more logs to throw in? Are we completely exhausted but ready for more? Mission accomplished!

Another key part of EVOLVE and S’MORE is for us to take a hard look at what is not working and what is getting in our way.

Where do we have noise in our life that needs to go away? Are we spending just a little too much time binging Netflix? Is Facebook a bit too long of a novel? Are we saying yes when we need to say no? We can dive in more on this later, but it’s that time we take to say - Wait! That’s clearly smoke; not fire.

This is also our inflection point:

Is this Campfire over and it’s time to stamp out the remnants and send everyone home? Or are we still working towards our S’more? 

We end Week 4 knowing how far we’ve come and we rest knowing on Monday we will come back again and take that time to plan thoughtfully what comes next.

There it is - the FIRE Cycle in a nutshell. We can't wait to see how you adapt and make it your own! If you do, be sure to share your flame!!!

🔥 Stay fired up,

Deb and Donna

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